Snakeskin
by tarajcl
Summary: You are being shed. Beast Wars, Dinobot 2 fic, gen.


Disclaimer: None of the characters contained herein belong to me.

Warnings: Spoilers for the unaired episode 'Dark Glass.'

**Snakeskin**

His spine was being tugged at.

By teeth. Hmm. Carnivorous. Organic? No, the smell of fuel and techno-metabolism touched his nostrils. Maximal? Possibly; his scanners weren't reading. His scanners were not responding at all. But carnivorous teeth suggested either the fuzor or the cat. Both jaws were too small to belong to whomsoever it was currently chewing at the motor relays in his back.

Predacon, then. Megatron? Too big. Which left...

…no one.

"Who are you?" he queried, unable to do more; the severing of his spinal column had left him paralyzed.

Although he could still feel, quite distinctly, the teeth sinking into his hind legs and beginning to tear through synth-flesh. So it was a dream. Logic, at last.

Now relaxing his guard as far as he could- he could hear meaty crunches above him, and the sound of something slithering down a long throat- he flicked his tongue into the air, sniffed and swiveled his eyes. They were inside a ship, likely the command centre. Maximal design. Hence, the Axalon.

His legs were no longer sensory. Neither was a good chunk of his belly and back.

"Who are you?"

He did not bother asking again, and the rest of his being eaten alive continued in awkward silence.

"I am a carcass," muttered something above him during the final seconds, before jaws belonging to no Predacon and no Maximal closed over his skull.

"I cannot die," he muttered, coming out of recharge slowly.

"Megatron to Dinobot."

"Received."

"I require your presence."

The clone sometimes awoke to find that Rampage had scrawled things on his walls. Black paint and oil read words like 'rebirth' and 'consumption.' This morning, 'immortality' was written over the ceiling, in a language he could read but did not remember learning. He made a note to clean it off later; a section of him that appreciated cleanliness.

Megatron, that section probably was.

"I cannot die," he repeated, before he left. The pulse of Rampage's unholy spark confirmed that this true.

Megatron allowed himself some concern when the clone asked after its name.

"Is something wrong, hmm?"

"No. I was merely…curious."

"You're as bad a liar as ever, then," mumbled the Predacon leader. The clone stared at him blankly, and he sighed. Gave it the name he had been calling it from the beginning, and sent it out to assist Inferno with the removal of debris from outside their main entrance. A meteor shower had fallen; he'd scratched among the pieces eagerly for remnants of stasis pods, but had been unrewarded.

"What is your _name_?" There was some genuine puzzlement in his voice, and no small quantity of humor.

The clone's incapacity to scan and adapt its form was design, not error. Megatron, already well on the road to a madness from which he would not return, had felt it would be better that the clone remained inadaptable beyond this world. It would never escape before Megatron himself did; and by the time Megatron did, the leader would no longer have a use for it.

Predacons accumulated hundreds, _thousands_ of names in the course of their lives, depending on how many planets they visited. Megatron had had sixty-seven so far, running from Empiricus the stealth jet to Linerunner the tank to Marvellion the seeker to Pathfinder, the Predacon construction vehicle- his last before the escape to Earth.

The clone would only ever have one, and it wasn't even its own to have.

Megatron found that truly humorous.

Three days later, the clone underwent a malfunction of a level as yet unwitnessed his creator. To Megatron's distress and the Predacons' alarm, it became utterly convinced that it was dead.

"I _died,_ I _know_ I died,_ I_ _felt it happening!" _

Things crashed off shelves and were swept onto the floor in the laboratory, and Megatron was forced to shut it down via close-range electro-pulse.

"Ready the testing facilities, set up the grids for analysis. And clean this mess up," he told Quickstrike wearily. The fuzor, for his part, was hiding under a desk.

Some minor safeguards were put in place, some coding was reinforced. He was careful not to add any additional personality functions; between Dinobot's reanimated remains and Rampage's volatile circuitry, there was more than enough to suppress as it was.

It seemed to do the trick; the clone got up from the slab, bowed and went on patrol. Megatron sighed, congratulated himself, and wiped all records of the process from the databanks before Tarantulas could get back from his sample-gathering and espy them.

The clone, meanwhile, took care to wipe the offending graffiti from his quarters. The next time they encountered the Maximals and the traitorous widow, he took advantage of the opportunity to pull off her legs, and tore out hunks of flesh from Rhinox's side. Megatron congratulated himself again.

But the clone was still aware that he was dead. He imparted this knowledge to Waspinator, who only muttered "Know how zombie-bot feelzzz."

"My name is death," the clone muttered the next morning, when he woke up having scratcehd words like 'empty' and 'ignorant' into the floor and recharge berth with his claws.

"My name is never-ending. I…I cannot die."

The rat came soonafter, with his secrets, and unleashed one of the monsters in his head. If he had had the capacity, he would have hated him for it.

And the scales were tipped.

_I pity you. In this body, I will become vapour and evaporate. As whole as I can be. You will live forever, in pieces._

He felt it every day, the slow rising of he-who-had–come-before. The entity and his thoughts/beliefs/anger moved from circuit to circuit, as a virus. Things came disconnected; he would find himself stalking through the forest with no memory of how he had come to be there. When this happened, he would stop, grin inasmuch as he could, and feel death approaching

The scales, between which he hung like a spider web, were tipped.

He awoke in the middle of the savannah once, beside smooth mounds of granite. His claws were stained with ochre, and the words on the rock were 'non-existent', 'copy' and 'taste.'

_I taste your fear, little nothing. Or is it his?_

_I don't fear you._

And he didn't. It wasn't Rampage who was about to devour him.

_My name is death._

In the end, he died by inches.

"I have no name."

Ochre and oil and skins hung on walls became the stuff of his dreams.

There was no climax. He was designed to fight and only to fight, but the enemy was his mind, far more of his mind now than Rampage had ever been. Besides, what had the enemy to fight? The clone had no beliefs or resentments or thoughts of his own; he had Rampage's enjoyment of pain and Dinobot's enjoyment of conquest and Megatron's inflicted loyalty which felt more and more false every day…and _he_, what he thought of as _him_, was nothing more than the spider thread lines tying it together.

So he did not fear death; he had nothing to fear it with.

Just before the entirety of his other, his gone-before and still-to-come suffused him, he…those barely-born traces of what was he…felt. In the few hours before the clone disappeared and the warrior was reborn in his shell, grief touched him. The thread-thin fibers of understanding and questioning that comprised _him_ keened in their quiet way, for he would have had longer.

_I am without name, I am the sum of others' parts, I am unmade, my namemynamemy, his name, mymy, his, my!_

"My name is death."

Dinobot opened his eyes.


End file.
